No Reason For A Ghost 2

I would like to follow up on my last story (if you haven't read it, please do so because this might not make sense) because it's gotten worse.

A lot of people dismissed most of what I said in my last story, and most arguments were perfectly valid and logical. And while all those may be true, I think it's unlikely given what has happened around my house, and now what happened at my neighbor's house.

To begin I want to talk about what happened at my house, which is pretty scary. I like to stargaze, so I'm often outside late at night. Sometimes I only get back at two in the morning. Two days ago (August 26th), I reached home around midnight. I opened the door, and my brother was lying flat on his face at the bottom of the staircase. To make this clear, the staircase has two landings. The one closer to the lower floor, the one I was on, has four steps following it.

Anyway, I was really surprised and asked my brother what was wrong and if he was okay. This is a direct quote: "No! Something poked me in the back and I lost my balance!" According to him, he lost his balance walking down and tripped off the landing. Now, that could be an excuse for a stupid accident, but my brother isn't a good liar when he's angry or nervous, and he was REALLY angry. It's still possible, but personally I don't believe it was an excuse. And if I thought he was lying, it's a pretty feeble excuse. But that piece of potential evidence can be dismissed if you don't like it. The next thing, though... Well, please trust me on it.

On the first floor, we have an office that if you left the stairs and continued walking forwards, you would be in. If you turned to the left you would be in the living room. There is no wall in between them, but there is a shelf and piano blocking the way. I was turning on the gas fireplace in the living room when I heard books fall off the shelf. Almost like somebody was holding them and dropped them on accident. It took me a minute to convince myself to go over there because I wasn't sure what I would see or hear if I went over. But I reasoned myself into it and found three children's books lying on the floor. I was putting them back on the shelf when - I don't know why, maybe it was instinctual - I turned to look at the stairs.

I swear that I'm not inventing a stupid story. But there was a little girl sitting on the second-to-last step. She was almost completely transparent. It almost looked like she was distorted light. I gasped really hard and was too scared to move. Her expression looked almost apologetic, and she stood up and vanished. All of this took less than ten seconds.

I know that sounds like something you see in a bad movie about a haunting, but I swear that this happened. I was pretty terrified. But when I calmed down, I realized there was nothing threatening about it. She was just sitting there, after all.

One of the biggest things I was wondering was why nothing like this had ever happened before. I've never seen anything, and it actually took me a while to convince myself I wasn't dreaming. But what I decided was that it was probably because I had started taking things more seriously. I want to be a research psychologist when I grow up, so I've looked into a lot of things. One thing that I've read about frequently was how the brain filters out things that it does not expect. For example, people often don't recognize other people they know in certain settings because they don't expect to see them there. It seems like a reasonable explanation to me, but if anybody has another theory I'd be interested to hear it.

I was considering this and I decided to be much more watchful. Then I noticed a pattern in the behavior. It was all childish. Sneaking up and poking somebody to get their attention sounds like a childish prank. The books were all for young kids. Rattling things and making noise amounts to a passion in some kids I know. It fits in with the barely-visible girl I'm positive I saw.

If you think I'm getting carried away and choose to ignore that, at least continue reading for what I'm going to say next.

I have basically a cat-sitting business in my neighborhood. Two of my neighbors constantly ask me to watch their cats if they go out of town for whatever reason. I was taking care of one of the cats last week, and while I was there, four times Autumn (the cat) seemed to be looking at something, and then would start hissing. After that she usually sprinted over to me and sat down shaking in my lap. It was like she could see something I couldn't and it was freaking her out. Every time this happened we were over by their daughter's room. In that room, there is a large decorative urn. I was told there aren't any ashes in it anymore (emphasis on 'anymore'), so that may have nothing to do with Autumn's strange behavior, but I thought it was odd, and possibly relevant.

*****

I wasn't going to add this at first, but if I'm going to talk about other houses in the neighborhood, I'm going to add two stories.

The first took place two years ago, when some of the houses in my neighborhood were still under construction. My friend Julie and I sneaked into one of the houses after finding what looked like a finger bone of a human less than a yard from it. When we were inside, all of a sudden we heard really, really loud footsteps going down the stairs we were going up. And when I say loud, think about heavy, clunking hiking boots being slammed against the floor. Needless to say, we sprinted out. It was just so LOUD. I can guarantee nobody but us was in the house. It wasn't for sale because they still had to finish some of the wiring, but it had snowed really heavily about the same time, and the construction workers, plumbers, and electricians weren't coming to work on the houses.

In reference to the above, a lot of people in the comments of my last story mentioned how dangerous logging was. I did some research and found that there was a large demand for timber starting in about 1840 until the 1880s. Much of the timber was supplied by people in Western Washington- right where I am. There was such a great demand that in the interest of efficiency, safety was disregarded and a substantial percentage of loggers died. Loggers wore heavy, solid boots, sometimes with a deposit of lead in the sole. Ones that were probably pretty noisy indoors, if you get what I'm hinting at.

Now for my second extra story. This happened around the same time as the footstep story. There's a park across the street from my house and I was hanging out with Julie and a cousin of her's when Julie suddenly pointed at the window of a house that had recently been finished. She said, "I didn't know anybody had moved in there." In the window there was an incredibly tall man on the third floor. The top of his head was obstructed by the window frame. He seemed to walk away after a moment. We were out in the park for another four hours (it was eleven at night when we split up to go home) and nobody left the house. I've never even met somebody who's almost seven feet tall, so I don't know who that was.

I'm extremely sorry about how long this has been, so I apologize. Disregard or believe whatever you choose to; I stand by it all.